1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to communication using multiple communication channels of different media types.
2. Description of the Related Art
In today's emerging technological and information world, companies are interacting with their customers, potential customers and other contacts through a wide variety of different communication channels. Such communication channels include face-to-face, telephone, fax, email, voicemails, wireless communication, Internet information inquiries via call me now and call me later, Internet collaborative sessions, paging and short messaging services. With all these communication channels, companies are faced with managing each customer interaction while meeting service levels and maximizing customer satisfaction. In addition, companies are faced with optimally staffing and training their workforce to deal with customers through these communication channels whether through their customer support center(s), telebusiness organizations, or their sales, marketing, and service professionals.
Currently, many companies have dedicated email inboxes, fax inboxes, and voicemail boxes defined for specific business areas as well as automated call distributors. Employees called agents are assigned to poll and manage the support requests from customers for each communication channel. Combined with the traditional call queues for inbound telephone calls, each agent is tasked with managing his or her work using all these communication channels while not having any visibility to the queue status and priorities of each customer support request and/or communication channel.
Most communication software is designed to work with a single communication device or type of communication channel. If a company wishes to implement a customer support center where agents can communicate using multiple communication channels of different media types, typically the company must purchase different software products to handle each media type because of the different communication protocols involved. For example, normally an email server is sold separately from software that can receive data via wireless access protocol. Because different products must be purchased, agents must learn to use a different user interface for each media type of the multiple communication channels. Efficiency of an agent typically degrades when he or she must remember different user interfaces for communicating with customers via different media types.
With customer support centers handling very large numbers of customer support requests daily, increasing the efficiency of each agent in responding to each customer request by only seconds can produce enormous cost savings for the customer support center.
Thus, it is desirable to provide a system that includes a universal queue strategy capable of assigning, routing, and queuing work items from multiple channels of communications to an agent having the appropriate skills to respond to the request. The system should enable the agent to view and manage his or her work items for all communication channels. Such a system reduces the response times and increases customer satisfaction, while balancing priorities amongst work items in multiple communication channels.
What is needed is a user interface that allows an agent to receive and respond to customer support requests as efficiently as possible. The user interface should provide a consistent interface independent of the media type of the communication channel. The user interface should enable the agent to receive and respond to events such as customer support requests and send outgoing commands to a communication channel. The user interface should allow the agent to simultaneously work on multiple active work items independently of the media types of the communication channels involved. The user interface should provide the capability for the agent to accept new work items, release completed work items, suspend active work items, and resume suspended work items. The user interface should allow the user to work interactively with the customer for communication channels providing interactive communication, such as communication channels for telephone and web collaboration.